I was not traversing the same streets as the people who were walking about the town that day, I was traversing a past, gliding, sad and sweet; a past which was moreover compounded of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to recognise the cause of my melancholy, to know whether it was due to those walks in which the hope of meeting Gilberte had co-existed with the fear that she would not come, to the proximity of a certain house to which I had been told that Albertine had gone with Andree, or to that vanity of all things which seems to be the significance of a route which one has followed a thousand times in a state of passion which has disappeared and which has borne no fruit, like the route which I used to take on those expeditions of feverish haste after luncheon to see, with the paste still damp upon them, the posters of Phedre and Le Domino noir.
The cab turned into the Champs-Elysees and, as I did not particularly want to hear the whole of the concert which was being given at the Guermantes party, I stopped it and was preparing to get out in order to walk a few yards when I was struck by the spectacle presented by another cab which was also stopping. A man with staring eyes and hunched figure was placed rather than seated in the back, and was making, to keep himself upright, the efforts that might have been made by a child who has been told to be good. But his straw hat failed to conceal an unruly forest of hair which was entirely white, and a white beard, like those which snow forms on the statues of river-gods in public gardens, flowed from his chin. It was - side by side with Jupien, who was unremitting in his attentions to him - M. de Charlus, now convalescent after an attack of apoplexy of which I had had no knowledge (I had only been told that he had lost his sight, but in fact this trouble had been purely temporary and he could now see quite well again) and which, unless the truth was that hitherto he had dyed his hair and that he had now been forbidden to continue so fatiguing a practice, had had the effect, as in a sort of chemical precipitation, of rendering visible and brilliant all that saturation of metal which the locks of his hair and his beard, pure silver now, shot forth like so many geysers, so that upon the old fallen prince this latest illness had conferred the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 890-891
After several years in the sanatorium, in an unsuccessful attempt to cure his illness, Marcel returns to Paris and is invited to a concert at the Guermantes. And, if we are to believe him, Marcel is not that interested in attending, which, considering his love of music and his fascination observing human nature, is a testament to his mindset at the time. He stumbles across a seemingly ancient man who turns out to be, I suppose not surprisingly, M. de Charlus. The years that Marcel lost in the sanatorium have clearly not been kind to the Baron: "A man with staring eyes and hunched figure was placed rather than seated in the back, and was making, to keep himself upright, the efforts that might have been made by a child who has been told to be good. But his straw hat failed to conceal an unruly forest of hair which was entirely white, and a white beard, like those which snow forms on the statues of river-gods in public gardens, flowed from his chin."All in all, it had left the Baron with "the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear."
Even before seeing M. de Charlus it's obvious that Marcel is struggling with his place in this Paris which has carried on without him. Proust writes: "I was not traversing the same streets as the people who were walking about the town that day, I was traversing a past, gliding, sad and sweet; a past which was moreover compounded of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to recognise the cause of my melancholy . . ." Abu Dhabi hardly qualifies as a sanatorium, although there were enough folks there who should have been drying out somewhere, but I shared a bit of Marcel's melancholy. One would have thought that once returning the the States that I would have been desperate to see people, but initially the opposite was true. Part of it was certainly a sense of a lack of connection, but it also related to the fact that the world had clearly gone on without me, and would again if I were gone again.
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